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Wednesday, April 16, 2014

A gift like dreaming

My parental units haven’t had words
with me in years when they could avoid it. My sib and I had been
designed with fluid genotypes: the kind that can be shifted into a
new, stable form within hours and not have the traits rejected.
Different eyes, skin, gills, tails, fur: you name it, it can be done.
Kel used it to aid in exploring beyond the solar system, until the
illness. Kel was gone now, accepting the only opportunity to survive
by getting her mind transferred out of body: and in Kel’s case,
into radio waves that would keep exploring the universe.

I became an exotic: need a significant
for a night? A party guest to liven up an evening? Someone to stand
around as weird furniture? Give me a few hours notice and I can have
a few new traits and show up as needed. I make a lot of money at it,
enough that I can ignore offers of sex as part of any contract. Not
that my parents know that. I like to think they’d talk to me if
theyd did.

After Kel went away I indulged in
really odd traits wings, tentacles, suckers, being neuter. Even my
hardcore friends blanched at hanging out when I’d been covered in
quills and spikes for a week. Right now I’m male again, though I’ve
kept a tail. I’ve decided tails are nice and it’s been a long
time since I’ve kept any cosmetic trait for more than a week. My
tail is long and pale the rest of my skin a swirling of colours that
shift and change when I touch anything or it touches me. It includes
the wind on my face; I’ve been told the effect can be dizzying but
I quite enjoy it. It’s liberating not to care what others think of
my body at all. And strange it has taken me so long to reach this
point.

I get four messages within as many
hours with offers of contracts, desires for certain traits. Et
cetera. I let my system send automated replies that I’m busy with
another client, offer up a few other exotics as potential
alternatives. They’ll repay the favour to me in return some day
down the road. The street I’m walking down is pretty worn-out:
you’d need a float car to navigate the road at all and the
sidewalks are no better but there are still a few storefronts for
businesses that need to be more than showcases for prefab items.

The mechanic’s shop isn’t anything
special, though it’s more well-built than most shops as it has been
blown up at least once. There is ample space for parking and the
exterior is clean, neat and tidier than some more professional
businesses ever manage. External appearances are important, after
all. I head in, the door opening for me after a short scan. The shop
is large, hosting six vehicles right now along with a bewildering
array of scanning devices, repair modules and toolkits in a neat
chaos.

Dar is pacing the middle of the shop.
“I know I told it would be a day, but repairing decade-old apps and
not updating them takes time,
Mr. Alcourt. Yes, it is done but I need at least another day to make
sure they’re all communicating properly and won’t break down
soon. You – don’t care.
I see.” He stops, continues moving. “Very well. Engage.”

An old, battered hovercar in the right
corner shimmer and vanished into thin air.

I blink, stare at the spot where it had
been, then at Dar. “Someone paid for a transmit of that?”
I tried to work out of the cost of turning an entire antique car into
pure information and reforming it on another part of the world intact
and gave up.

He
snorts. “He had it transmitted here, too.” Dar looks to be about
seventeen, with a mechanics rough hands and a warm and ready smile.
He’s been updating the projection over the past few months after I
pointed out that him being a transfer was difficult enough for some
clients without him still looking like the eight-year old kid he’d
been before the accident. He drops the projection, revealing a torso
on treads, two of at least a dozen arms currently outside his dark
chassis. The top is a viewscreen with a replica of his face, which
does make people feel a little better talking to him, not that his
voice isn’t almost pitch-perfect.

I walk
over, circling him critically. The
vieswcreen now compasses his entire ‘head’ and turns with me.
“You’re a bit taller than you used to be.”

He grins. “Well,
I don’t need a body small enough to comfortably fit under
eight-year Dar, so I figured I might as well make my body a bit
bigger. Also more room for a few more scans and tools.” He raps his
chest with one arm. “It’s okay, right?”

“It is.” He has
a chair for guests that does incredible massages, among other things.
I ignore it and find one of his scanning tables to sit on.

He rolls over,
curious, and extends one limb to poke my tail. “You’re still
keeping that.”

I
smack his limb away with a
flick of the tail, which wins
a grin. “I like it. You
have any pressing work?”

“Not
now, no. Why?”

He
hasn’t had a human body for over eight years; you forget things,
even when you don’t want to. Mind you, it’s also me so having a
glove on just one hand is perhaps not worth noting. If
he – or the shops systems – have scanned it, he gives no sign of
noticing the glove is
a stealth
mesh. I remove it
and press the fingertips of my right hand to the middle his body.

“What
– oh. Oh!” Dar’s face vanishes entirely from the viewscreen and
for a moment his projection is visible, mouth dropping open, eyes
wide in shock before it vanishes. Treads
whine a little, which I’ve never heard before, as his body rocks
and then moves back a step, his face appearing again. “Max. What is
– was – what?” he gets out.

“A
trait.” I reach over, run a finger down his side. The yelp he lets
out is worth entire cost of the trait.

“Max!”

I give
him a poke with my tail; his limbs twitch, relax. “It’s just the
one hand; neural stimulator, modified to work on transfers. Probably
intended as a weapon, given the current views
of transfers, but it has other uses.”

“Like what?” he
says warily, but doesn’t move.

I flex my fingers,
alter the trait with a thought and run them over his body slowly. He
lets out small gasps before his vocal systems shut down entirely. I
count out a minute, two, a third. Release. It takes almost five
minutes from that for the viewscreen to flicker, Dar’s face
appearing in it again.

“Max?”

He sounds scared; I
never intended for scared. “What was it like?”

“A wave. A wave
with images behind it.” Dar is silent for a few seconds. “It was
like dreaming was, when I could dream?”

I grin. “Good.”

“But –.”

“You’ve fixed
vehicles for my clients at a reduced rate and you’re my only friend
who doesn’t give a crap what I look like.”

He snorts. “Like
I would?” he manages, almost steadily.

“You could; you
don’t. It’s the least I could do.”

“Oh.” Dar licks
his lips in the viewscreen, moves closer. “Could you do it again?”

I reach out, and he
falls into dreams and bliss, shutting down his vocal interface before
I can hear whatever sounds he might be making. We do strange things
for friendship, but giving someone dreams is worth it.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”